"Surprisingly mature reflections on the environment—with Adams's trademark comedy humming along at high pitch: eco-humor comes of age."

Despite the joint authorship, this is Adams's (The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, etc.) book, written in the first-person and marked by his singular nose for absurdities, as he and zoologist Cawardine—who contributes an epilogue—tour the world on the track of rare or endangered species.
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From the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series: a sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (not reviewed), in which our laid-back, freethinking detective arrives five hours late for an appointment with his client (he's been decapitated in the interim), suffers a broken nose at the hands of an adolescent TV addict, and gets trapped in his living room by a large and evidently demented eagle.
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"Despite the slow start, there's less silliness and more comic substance than usual here—making this, overall, the best entry since the original Hitchhiker's."

In the disjointed, amiable, but not particularly funny opening to this fourth in the comic Hitchhiker's series, we catch up with the doings of the main characters: Ford Prefect, stuck light-years from civilization, puzzled that the new edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy now features all the tourist information about Earth that he collected; and Arthur Dent, uneasily arriving on an Earth that he thought had been destroyed by the Vogons to make way for an interstellar bypass.
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"Overall, however: an effortful enterprise which at best achieves a sort of slow-witted camp pulp—and only for Adams addicts."

If The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a work of genuine lunacy, and its sequel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe less inspired and considerably more ragged, this is a much busier but practically mirthless offering: the whole notion palls, the dialogue is frequently reduced to the characters telling one another to "zark off," and even the chunks of furious hyperbole have an ominously serious ring.
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"Lots of pure silliness, too many English references for U.S. readers, but—like moviegoers who sat through Life of Brian for the sake of a few good chuckles—fans of absurd deadpan parody will happily flip through this likable send-up in order to extract a couple of dozen fine giggles."

Sci-fi, Monty Python-style—as West England villager Arthur Dent becomes the only survivor of Earth, rescued by Ford Prefect of Betelgeuse, a roving researcher for The Hitchhiker's Guide: when Earth is destroyed (demolished by the Vogons to make way for a hyperspatial express route), the two of them escape into a Vogon spaceship.
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